These Are the Names (6 page)

Beg shrugged. ‘We used to sing it at home. I thought maybe you would know what it's about, because I have no idea.'

‘What song was it again?'

Hesitantly, Beg spoke the first line, the words whose meaning he didn't know. ‘Ay, Rivkele, ven es veln zayn royzn, veln zey bliyen.'

‘Louder! I can't hear you!'

Beg repeated the words.

‘And the melody?' the old man asked. ‘Sing it — maybe then I'll recognise it.'

And so it happened that Pontus Beg sang a Yiddish song for the old rabbi.

‘Good! Very good!' The old man crowed with pleasure. ‘You should keep practising — you've got talent!'

Beg lowered his eyes. Even his nails and his hair felt embarrassed.

‘Do you know what you're singing? ‘O Rebecca, if there are roses, they will be in flower …' A love song.'

He showed Beg to the door. The low, darkened corridors smelled of wet gypsum. Faint electric light shone on the walls. Beg thought he could still see the smoked cones left on the ashen plasterwork by old tallow candles. For more than two hundred years, with a few black-bordered interludes, this building had served as a house of prayer — and the final guardian, a love song on his lips, was leading him to the exit.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The comforter

They trudged in single file, heads bowed, eyes dull and unseeing. Once they had looked expectantly to the horizon, towards the land of hopes beyond that, but their gaze was drawn away less and less frequently now, until it no longer rose from the ground before their feet.

When the tall man fell, he blinked his eyes in amazement, as though he'd been tripped. The boy walked past him.

‘Help me out, would you?' the tall man panted. ‘You can have my shoes. Okay?'

But the boy walked on, a fathomless contempt in his eyes.

One by one, the others passed him. He looked up at them like a dying animal.

‘Hey,' he said weakly, ‘wait a minute.'

Their eyes swept over his body in search of what might still be useful. The shoes. His coat. His sweater full of holes. It was growing colder all the time.

Was he himself the one who had once robbed a laggard, the tall man thought with wavering conviction. So long ago now … So far away, as though it was someone else … He had twisted the man's head forcefully to one side as the others stripped the clothes from his body and ransacked his pockets. He had pressed his hand so hard against the man's mouth that he had felt the false teeth break.

That was how they looked at him now, too. Prey.

He tried to regain his footing, but his legs were so heavy. Heavier than they'd ever been, even though they were so thin.

Is this the end of me, is this what it looks like? he thought. A picture from a great height: his skin, his flesh, how it slowly became an impression in the sand, half-eaten by animals, half soaked into the earth; his bones being spread out over the steppe.

The place where he lay amazed him. Sand and tough, yellow grass; random as rain. This was how others died. He smelled the wet earth, his grave.

They had all left home on their own. Chance had brought them together; no one was responsible for anyone else. As long as you could walk, you belonged to the group; as long as you could walk, you made the group stronger. If the group had to care for its individual members, it weakened. Altruism would be the death of it. Strict self-interest improved the chances of survival. The boy, too, had understood that intuitively. He had walked past others before; he had remained deaf to the pleas, the shrieks behind him.

Sometimes there were little acts of mercy — quick, almost secretive, exceptions. Irrational. Unwise. The group disapproved of such breaches of naked self-preservation.

Panting, the tall man's breath went in and out. The killing thirst. A primal memory of pain, when his whole being was a soundless scream for his mother, for reassurance.
My sweet boy
, she cooed,
my sweet Mischa, where have you ended up this time? I can't help you like this, can I? You're alone, Mischa, alone.

A hand brushed his arm. He smiled through his tears. So she had come anyway … She hadn't left him … So long ago, his dear mother, such an eternity.

He opened his eyes to see her.

Standing over him was the Ethiopian.

The tall man groaned in misery. He was pulled up by one arm to a sitting position. He feared the black man's intentions. He wouldn't put up a fight. He would simply close his eyes to the harm the other would do him.

The Ethiopian took a weathered blue bottle from his bag. He unscrewed the cap and pressed the opening to the tall man's lips. The coolness of stone. Water dribbled into his mouth.

‘Maj,' the black man said, and poured another trickle into his mouth.

‘More,' the tall man said.

‘Maj,' the black man said again. The tall man repeated it after him — maj, maj.

He took the bottle from his hand and drank greedily of the earthy-tasting water. When it was finished, he could smell the black man: his stale sweat, his bodily fat, and the spoiled smell that rises from an empty stomach. They had never been this close before. He felt shame and gratitude.

He tried to stand up, but sank back in the dust. His fingers tingled; his vision swirled before his eyes.

The Ethiopian's hand disappeared into his satchel again. It reappeared, holding a miracle: a rusty can. Beans … goulash … it could be anything — the label was gone. He must have found it in the village, during his foray through the houses. The tall man couldn't keep his eyes off the can. A can of food. A treasure. Perverse riches.

The black man knelt. He held the can between his knees and struck it with the point of a rock. He dented the can, but couldn't open it. The agony was unbearable. The tall man leaned back and slipped his knobby, yellowed fingers into his pocket. Slowly, he righted himself again and handed his knife to the Ethiopian. Now he could murder him with his own weapon. The thought glistened behind his eyes for a moment, and then disappeared.

The tip of the knife bored its way into the flimsy can. Gouging and cutting, the blade ate its way through, revealing the jagged metal edge of the lid. The tall man leaned forward. He wanted to see what was in it — he would have yanked it out the Ethiopian's hands if he'd been able to. When the hole was big enough, the black man bent up the edges. Now they took turns poking their fingers into the can, and ladling out the jellied substance. It had a vague taste of meat bouillon. They gobbled it down, licked their bleeding fingers, and scraped the remains from the sides and bottom. When the can was completely clean, their eyes met, big and charged, as though they were coming to their senses after having committed some ecstatic crime.

He shared his food with me, the tall man thought, all the food he had. He is a great and noble person. He has a heart like a whale. I'm not worthy to see the light in his eyes.

His bottom lip quaked, and tears ran down his face. The Ethiopian had shown him the light of his soul, a bright light; he felt how it had crossed over to him, the way you light one candle with another. He covered his eyes with his hands and sobbed. Once in his lifetime, a person weeps because he sees through himself completely. Once in his life, he weeps because he knows he is beyond salvation.

The black man put the can back in his satchel and looked around. He didn't seem to notice the other man's fit of weeping. He stood up and checked his pockets. The food had done him good; he blinked contentedly at the huge, black clouds over the steppes.

He licked the knife and held it out to the tall man, who snatched it out of his hand.

When the tall man awoke with a start from the delirious ravings of his dreams and looked up at the white moon, he prayed that his tribulations might end here. It had rained a bit, and the moon hung motionless behind thin, restless tatters of cloud. His gratitude towards the black man turned to poisonous resentment. He was ashamed of his thoughts, but could not shoo them away. Within the space of a few hours he had prayed to live on and he had prayed to die — it was between those polar extremes that he drifted, his long legs in a splits between living and dying. But he did not die; not yet.

Around him lay the things he had scavenged during the long journey — the metal lid, his helmet of rusty mesh, a long stick that he leaned on and which he had decorated clumsily with his knife. He leaned on it when he rose to his feet, his bones stiff and aching from the cold. The black man lay a few metres away in his circle of grass, his hands folded on his chest like a vanquished knight. He took a few steps. A crack of red light crawled onto the edge of the world; in surprise, he noted that he had come back to life.

With his stick, he poked the Ethiopian in the side. The black man had been to a wedding party in his dreams: whooping men had ridden horses into the big tent, women clapped and sang, he was happy in the scented smoke of the fire, and he had eaten as much as he wanted. He didn't want to get up at all — he just wanted to lie there, where those things had come flying to him on weightless wings.

The tall man followed the trail, half obliterated by the rain. He was carrying only his little backpack. Everything else — the objects that had protected him from the rain, the flies, and the evil — had been left behind. He shuffled ahead, the grass crunching beneath his feet. He leaned heavily on his stick, no longer trusting his legs.

As he dragged himself across the steppe, the gadflies of his thoughts stung him. He owed his life to a pariah, to a man who existed at the edge of the group. Their lifelines had crossed and become hopelessly entangled. A debt had been placed on his skinny shoulders. The pale sun climbed in the sky behind him. There, too, somewhere, was the man to whom he owed his life. He did not look back.

CHAPTER NINE

The broken jug

Yehuda Herz is being buried on a cold, dry day; beside the grave is a mound of loose sand. A little further along, on a bench beneath a willow tree, the pallbearers sit smoking and talking quietly. From far away comes the crack of a hunter's rifle.

The Jewish cemetery lies east of town. It is surrounded by low poplars. The wind blows through the branches, producing a soft hissing that does not disturb the silence. Here the Jews have buried their dead since time immemorial, on a plot of ground that once lay on the steppe far outside the city. Meanwhile the apartment buildings have advanced on it, pushing out in front of them a flood of kitchen gardens, sheds, and trailers.

Pontus Beg couldn't come up with a good reason to attend Herz's funeral, but he went anyway. Perhaps, he told himself, he felt beholden to Zalman Eder. It was at his request, after all, that the rabbi was now murmuring prayers of which Beg understood not a word. His caftan crinkled in the wind.

The coffin lay atop a pair of crossbeams, soon to be lowered.

Loneliness three times over, Beg thought. A dead Jew, a living Jew, and a policeman with one cold foot and a peeping in his ears. In the distance a tractor edged across the fields. Gulls and crows lit down in the furrows.

The tall, grey stones threw thin shadows. The mason's chisel had hacked out texts in Hebrew, German, and Russian. Most of the gravestones were ancient; some of them leaned crookedly.

Beg shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Peering through his lashes, the pile of sand beside the grave looked like a sleeping bear. His mother's maiden name was Medved —Russian for ‘bear'. The wind blew a tear from his eye. He wiped it away.

He had seen countless dead, but still he was awed by the feeling that the distance between him and the dead was as great as it was negligible. He had pulled frozen hoboes from the street, alcoholics who had drunk themselves to death, victims of violent impact with a blunt object (the coroner's jargon, not his), and the old and lonely who were found dead in their homes. Every dead person he saw, he regarded as a preparation for his own death — the crossing of the final border.

The rabbi held out his shaky hands. He invoked heaven, compassion, mercy. This fallible being, too, was a child of God; this person, broken like a jug.

The bearers rose to their feet, a disorderly troupe. Only when they approached the grave did the ceremonial descend into their movements. At the pit, each of them took one end of a rope. The beams were pulled away; the ropes stood taut. Slowly, the coffin floated into the depths, the tassels of Herzl's prayer robe sticking out the sides.

‘But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of days.'

Beg bent down stiffly and tossed a few spades of sand onto the coffin.

The rabbi wandered slowly amid the graves. Sometimes he stopped beside a stone. Mendel Kanner. Alexander Manasse.
He's taking a walk through the past
, thought Beg, a few steps behind him.
He's visiting his friends.
The grass was high; the steppe had advanced to between the graves.

Zalman Eder turned to look over his shoulder. ‘I'll be the next to go. At home in the house of the living.'

A few rows before the end, he stopped again. ‘My wife, blessed be her memory,' he said, pointing at the stone in front of him. ‘This is where I will lie. Remember that, if you please.' He laughed quietly, raspingly.